Merilyn Fairskye: Precarious
On 26 April 1986, at 1:23:44, Reactor No. 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded. One hundred times more radiation was released than by the atom bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
More from this Issue
Beata Batorowicz – Tales within Historical Spaces
QUT Art Museum, Brisbane 1 September – 28 October 2012
Shen Shaomin: The day after tomorrow
The Day After Tomorrow is Chinese-Australian Shen Shaomin’s first solo show in Australia in ten years. His visions of a warped natural world tap into anxieties about civilisation’s ghastly effects. “The space for our lives is shrinking,” Shen said in a recent interview. “The world is more and more dangerous because of the way that we live our lives.”
9th Shanghai Biennale: Re-Activation
Chief Curator: Qiu Zhijie Co-curators: Boris Groys, Jens Hoffmann, Johnson Chang Shanghai Power Station of Art and other venues 2 October 2012 – 31 March 2013
Making a virtue out of adversity: Christchurch post-earthquake
Director of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu Jenny Harper writes about the resilience and the pioneering spirit of the many and varied achievements of the Gallery since the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Canterbury.
Falling through time
In September 2011 at the UTS Gallery in an exhibition called The Fall before the Fall Elvis Richardson and Daniel Mudie Cunningham showed work reflecting on 9/11. Anna Gibbs analyses how their works make this trauma "articulable, shareable and ... to some extent, bearable."
In a silent way
Curator: Matt Warren Laura Altman, Monica Brooks, Nicolas Bullen, Darren Cook, Gail Priest, Lawrence English, Samaan Fieck, Joel Stern Contemporary Art Spaces, Hobart 28 July – 26 August 2012
Evidence of a catastrophe: The weather reports of James Guppy
The cloud/explosion paintings of James Guppy's The Weather Report series of 2006 were made as a response to 9/11.
Coming soon: Big mining and the question of scale
Ann Finegan raises the alarm on the fiendish short-sighted depradations of Big Coal open cut mining in the lower Hunter Valley and other places currently under threat. She describes the work done by artist/activists in response and asks: "How does one fight such incommensurables of scale and the slow unfold of food bowl and water disaster? Where do we start? With protective changes to State and Federal legislation? With commensurable economic data?"